Future Camp 1998

Daniel H. Robertson, John Hicks- Indiana University Purdue University
Indianapolis

The IUPUI
Future Camp is a one-week multidisciplinary, virtual reality, day camp
in its second year. The 18 campers, grades 9-11, attended camp from June 22 - 27 between the hours of 8:00AM -
3:00PM. The three projects for this years camp are: Virtual Art Gallery, Virtual Ocean Colonization, and Virtual
Indianapolis Zoo. The Virtual Art Gallery and Virtual Ocean Colonization were accomplished on an ImmersaDesk using
the CAVE libraries and LIMBO at the IUPUI Virtual Reality / Virtual Environments (VRVE) Lab. In both projects the 3D objects were
created in Alias Wavefront and loaded into the LIMBO worlds. The campers had full control of the position of the
objects. The coordinates were later extracted and the objects hard coded in.

Virtual Art Gallery (VAG)
The major concepts for the Virtual Art Gallery (VAG) project were to create virtual displays of art - perspective,
color, and movement. The campers spent two days at the Herron School of Art in the IRIS Centre for Digital Arts
using Photoshop 4.0 to manipulate 2D images. The assignments included a self-portrait and manipulating various
images to be used as texture maps. The campers then came to the IUPUI VRVE lab and used Alias Wavefront to make
a frame for their self-portrait, objects for a mobile, and other 3D objects for their wing in the gallery. Only
one of these students had any UNIX experience and none had used Alias Wavefront. In less than a week they were
able to populate the gallery with texture mapped 2D and 3D objects.

Virtual Ocean Colonization
(VOC)
The world population will likely pass six billion by the year 2000. The idea behind the VOC project is to come
up with a plan to maintain a comfortable and ecologically sound existence for future earth occupants. This project
simulates an ocean colony as one possible solution. The campers were posed with the problem of creating a self-sufficient
ocean structure to house approximately 10,000 people. They had to deal with logistical problems such as the structure
itself, location, food, waste, fuel, transportation, recreation, and other social issues. The campers were given
an empty ocean LIMBO world to colonize. They spent the week discussing possible solutions to problems and building
objects for the colony using Alias Wavefront.